When all this is over, media lying about shit needs be made legally vulnerable to very simple defamation cases by any party they lie about. Fox news as it exists today should hemmorage money in a just society.
They are legally vulnerable. The problem is that libel/defamation requires several specific tests to prove, some of which often dont apply to such situations.
-
They have to make a factual assertion that is demonstrably untrue. It cant be just an opinion. (This one heavily depends on the specifics what is claimed)
-
It must be publicated or otherwise spread to a third party. (This one obviously is the easiest test in this case)
-
The claim must clearly be of and concerning the plaintiff, i.e. the one claiming to have been defamed. (Again, this one depends. When they are talking about “these people”, “the protesters”, etc. but not specific individuals, this gets very hard to prove they were even including any specific individuals)
-
If the person claiming defamation is a public figure, they have to prove they either knew their claim was untrue or that they had a reckless disregard for the truth. If they are a private figure they have to prove that they at least acted with negligence when making their claim, meaning they didnt take reasonable steps to verify information. (This can also be a sticking point as they may claim that they had “good sources,” like the federal government, that verified their claims)
-
The claim has to have caused actual damages to the person, such as if their livelihood was harmed or receiving death threats. It can’t just be their feelings hurt or people being mad at them. (Again, situational for the people, their job, their situation, and the reactions of others.
Personally I think actual damages is a bad bar because that depends on factors beyond the defamer’s actions. I think the bar should be the reasonabulity of the risk of damages, instead. Like they should’ve known calling someone a looter may lose them a job, regardless of whether the actually lose a job or even had one already, right?
But anyway, a lot of the lies they tell have just enough wiggle room to claim that it fails on at least one of these tests. Like maybe they weren’t make a specific claim of fact was demonstrably untrue, or they were stating opinion but phrasing it as fact. Or maybe they made a claim about the actions of a group that was true of some, but not all of them. Or maybe they made specific claims of criminal activity and get to claim they verified it with a “reliable” source, like the DOJ or FBI. Or maybe the person can’t prove material damages were caused from the defamation. And then of course, in all of these cases, the defamed must actually seek out justice by bringing suit against the defamers, which plenty do have the money, time or know-how to do.
I highly doubt that any justice will come at scale after this unless huge class action suits are filed, but the Supreme Court has weakened class actions too.
-
Fox News should be forbidden by law.
You can’t call yourself a news organization and lie so transparently all the time. Make it a requirement that news organizations must by law factual
Fox News would disappear on day 1
Fox news already admitted (multiple times) that their programs are not news, and that no sane person would consider it news.
I think we need a law that says if a media organization is guilty of intentionally spreading fake news, that they need to spend an equal amount of time and effort on correcting the story.
So if fox spent 4 years spreading disinfo about the 2020 election, then they need to spend 4 years, on the same timeslots, broadcasts, and webpages, reporting that they intentionally spread disinfo.
Also, they should have to run a “surgeon general anti-smoking” style banner on all their programming that says “FOX INSISTS THAT THEIR CONENT IS NOT NEWS AND DOES NOT ACCURATELY REPORT FACTS AND CONTEXT.”
Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine that Ronald Reagan’s administration revoked.
To all of the good Americans who want to live in a world with alliances based on mutual respect and friendship, in a country that respects the rule of law and democratic principles… Keep fighting, ramp it up, they’re getting scared. Do not let up.
That dumbshit can’t understand that throwing that kind of gas onto the fire this early into the fascist takeover is just what it would take to wake up Americans.
I doubt it but I admire your optimism
I’ve long suspected that the only chance the US, and the world, has is the incompetence of the Trump administration.
The danger is that the organized “opposition” party is the Democrats, and Americans are slow to realize that if any significant change is to be made, it won’t involve the Dems much (though they might go along, once someone else has taken all the big risks and done the heavy lifting).
is just what it would take to wake up Americans.
LOL. Did Americans wake up when the National Guard killed and stabbed students in 1970?
Let me get this straight: He’s threatening to attack Iran to protect their violent protesters, while simultaneously threatening American citizen protesters for peacefully exercising their Constitutional 1st Amendment Rights?
Don’t forget Greenland. And Venezuela. And Mexico.
He’s since apologised which is sadly more than you’d expect from a Trump Stooge. https://www.arctictoday.com/trumps-iceland-ambassador-pick-apologizes-for-52nd-state-comment/
Calling it a joke country isn’t much better.
Classic bully behavior. “It’s just a joke bro”… then punch you in the face anyway.
I don’t see a “joke country” comment. Is that an edit fail?
Obviously this isn’t great, but it’s not on the scale of mendacious idiocy we’ve come to expects from the Americans.
They’ve edited the headline. When I saw it 30 minutes ago it said “joke country” in the headline. It was quite offensive, and all on the editor, so good choice to remove it. He didn’t actually call it that.
Anyway, his explanation is still that it’s just a joke.
Though Long said he could understand why the comments would have set off a reaction, he was adamant they were a joke and should not be taken seriously.
Maybe I’m polishing my own halo, but I think it’s very telling of how old fashioned these people are. Everyone in that kind of position ought to know better than to make jokes by now. Where have these people been for past twenty years? It’s just not acceptable. I don’t mind a good offensive joke, but there’s a time and place for that, and that place is far far away from any media and never to be done in a position of power.
Yeah, it’s all amateur hour in Washington now. Perhaps it’s not a terrible thing that the ambassador for what we now have to consider a hostile country is too dumb to keep his mouth shut.
I’m more disappointed in The Guardian TBH.
Motherfucker better stay away from Iceland. I planning a trip there this year.
Please be ready to have your phone scanned on the way back in. It might not happen, but I would make a backup anyways and then if they ask, just factory reset it.
It probably won’t happen to you, but this has been happening to whitest cishet people for a while now, randomly chosen too. They don’t care about just POC, they like inconveniencing people and the power trip is the point.
Plan having a whole different phone for that trip just for that reason.
I am too, in May
Thinking the fall for me. Less tourists. Going vanlife it for month there in a camper van.
We’re on a tour. Van was my choice but when it came to a vote I lost
Sorry tours are cool, but I prefer the freedom with the van.
and Canada.
The difference is that he’s vowing to protect the Iranian protesters, while also vowing to kill American protesters.
Killing, they’re past talk
That indeed is the case
It means he is fucking scared. He knows he is unpopular af.
Keep protesting and keep being adversarial to the regime in all non-violent methods. Just don’t react with violence. He sees that the public has turned on him for his immigration policies so he is trying to instigate violence to win back the public.
Much, much less information in the article than the title suggests. If you haven’t read it yet, don’t bother.
Also hes already invoked the Insurrection Act to deploy the Marines in LA which was shot down in court, so same shit different day.
It’s like they had AI summarize Wikipedia. (I read it just to see what counts as journalism at Time these days.)
Why does the article say “clashes between federal agents and members of the community” and not “clashes between federal agents and citizens”?
DO IT!
And while you are at it, invade Greenland, Canada and Iran.
Then cancel the midterms.You know you want to Trump!
So I dare you, DO IT!Adversarial Journalism! Someone needs to tell this man he’s a cunt to his face and he has bad ideas and his cronies are butt lickers, on television.
We already know he can’t hack confrontation, he melts down if he thinks a lesser is badmouthing him. Do it on live TV, consistently! Bully him, don’t let him get a word in, tell him he’s a nasty man, a rapist, and a cunt, and his dad thought so too.
Get in his face, make him sweat.
Once you start punishing people for insurrection you end up with a insurrection.
Nothing much, hes already murdering civilians and the gestapo is already oppressing us. He is also going to do this anyway. Get organized. Resist.
Oh, he’s going to do the thing he’s been planning on doing anyway? Real scary.
Tbh I’m a bit surprised he didn’t try this at some point last year
I mean he just intends to keep escalating and then do it anyway. It honestly doesn’t matter how we respond, he’s going to do it. Violence is the only thing he knows, and it makes him even angrier to be ignored or not get the violent response he wants.
This is a man who Bill Barr had to dangle the prospect of killing death row inmates like keys to a toddler to keep Trump focused on anything at all. He needed the “treat” of getting to kill someone just to be able to focus at all, and that was before he had completely succumbed to dementia.
He did when he sent Marines to Los Angeles.
That was very fucking serious, but cancelling federal legislative elections is absolutely a very fucking serious escalation in a different axis.
He’s got to time it right. The primary objective is to cancel the Midterm election, and it can’t happen too soon, or the courts will have time to thwart the scheme. One thing he’s good at is manipulating the court schedule, so he needs to take steps in the right order, at the right time.
He needs to suspend the election around mid-October, which means he needs to have a crescendo of violence through the Summer to lead to that, so he needs to call for National Martial Law across America at the beginning of Summer, and he’s going to warm us up for it by invoking the Insurrection Act over the next few months, and he’s warming us for that by threatening us today.
We’re pretty much right on schedule.
You could well be right, and you’re absolutely right about the mid-terms, but when you say we’re right on schedule, from the regime’s perspective I’d say we’re the better part of a year behind, and that’s why he’s speedrunning it now. He has provoked and is now fighting huge battles on EVERY front, and aside from SCOTUS it’s turning out that the courts are largely holding. Even SCOTUS has fallen somewhat short of 100% support, though to their shame, not by much.
I honestly don’t think he’s going to last to midterms. I’m not ignorant of the distinct possibility that he CAN, I just think he knows it’s now or never because he literally has nothing left to lose and has not managed to consolidate absolute power before the inevitable challenges to it began.
Also, to have martial law you have to have the military. Between the fact that this is a volunteer force comprised of servicepeople who have never had to shoot at their own countrymen, and some tacit and not-so-tacit reminders about not having to obey illegal orders all the way up the chain of command, I am not at all certain he has that.
The way to regime change is the same way you boil a frog: keep the heat low but slowly rising until it’s too late and the frog can’t jump out, even though he now knows he’s doomed. But because he is a creature of his own pettiness and unable to manage his own party, he’s accelerated his own schedule.
More and more Republicans are starting to cross the aisle, and while that is a low fucking bar for the rest of us, for the ones that do it, it’s a huge deal. Even the shooting of Renee Good was an own-goal, because it angered a lot more than Minnesotans. The certainty that he is not only in the Epstein files but that they are nowhere near going away is another growing issue: publicly, no one’s even trying to give him the benefit of the doubt anymore just because there is no doubt. And how many Americans actually want to annex Greenland, or Venezuela, or some other fucking country and see even more of our tax dollars siphoned off to other countries he doesn’t even know what he will do with while we can’t even afford healthcare anymore?
Even Putin’s propaganda machine can’t mask all this failure. Nope, it’s all blowing up NOW, because of his own stupidity, arrogance, and shortsightedness. He has to try to get a hold of it now, by any means, including extreme force, or it will all collapse. My thought, anyway.
Or you could be right and he somehow makes it through all this. Time will tell.
Great post, I agree with pretty much all of it. I do think that this timing is deliberate.
More importantly, I agree with you that cracks are showing, and that it is remarkable. Thom Tillis, a MAGA supporter, is speaking up regularly, and has used the term “amateur hour” to multiple issues.
I want to remind people how this sort of stuff happens. Remember when the Epstein Files release needed one more vote, and Johnson wouldn’t sweat her in? While that was happening, Trump was arm twisting his MAGA turncoats who weren’t having it. Once, the new rep got sworn in, and signed the release commitment right there on the same lectern, EVERY OTHER MAGA CHANGED THEIR VOTE, and voted YES. Even Trump had to endorse it (knowing he’d just dig in on the next battle). None of them wanted to have their No vote thrown in their faces at reelection.
That’s how they will finally fall. When enough have finally had enough, and decide to resist, the rest will come over, too, and MAGA will collapse. They may just decide that they’d rather have Vance, close down the circus, and spend 2 years normalizing and rebranding themselves for 2028.
If I were a MAGA who is worried about ending up in front of a wall, or at the end of a rope, or worse, I’d be seriously considering it.
I agree with your analysis that solidarity among MAGAts is largely a facade. They’re power-mad sociopaths who will backstab each other if they see any personal advantage in it.
They may just decide that they’d rather have Vance, close down the circus, and spend 2 years normalizing and rebranding themselves for 2028.
I’m less convinced about the odds of that. Those in the senior legislative leadership and in the cabinet aren’t thinking that far ahead, they’re running to grab what they can before they face justice-- either the formal kind, if it’s not too compromised, or the people’s kind, which will be far messier but also swifter, assuming Americans ever stir themselves from their apathy and learned helplessness.
assuming Americans ever stir themselves from their apathy and learned helplessness.
Americans respect the rule of law, and they’d much rather deal with this lawfully. MAGA sees the citizens’ reluctance to shift to violence as a weakness to exploit, counting on that never happening.
Eventually, their arrogance will go too far, and the walls of civility that has protected them up to that point will crumble, and they will be surprised to find themselves surrounded with a population seething with righteous indignation. Push the people hard enough to abandon their principles, and entire bloodlines will be ended, and fortunes confiscated.
Completely agree, and thank you for the thoughtful reply. I was not aware of Thom Tillis’ remarks, I’ll check those out. Funny you should bring up Adelita Grijalva, because hers was the last signature required on the discharge petition, as you already know. But since then, there have been several more discharge petitions filed to get legislation on the floor and past Mike Johnson’s blockade, something like five, each one taking a handful of Republicans to cross the aisle and support it, who are getting threatening Trump phone calls and doing it anyway.
Another House example is Don Bacon, who’s finally found a vestigial spine after announcing his retirement last summer and clearly terrified because he’s still in office: this whole “the House could impeach if we invade Greenland” non-statement he made today is absolutely him throwing a sop to MAGA while doing nothing but making a hat tip to the extreme danger of any foreign invasion we undertake as a country, and to his own personal responsibility as a Congressman in getting us embroiled in it.
So the wind has definitely turned a bit in D.C., especially when you consider it would only take five House Republicans to stop the vast majority of this current madness.
And it’s the press as well: today Karoline Leavitt completely lost her shit because a guy from The Hill openly said that the ICE agent who shot Renee Good “acted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably.” This too is a HUGE crack. I’m sure you already know this, but during the first term when everyone in the press understood that White House access would be granted solely to those toeing the MAGA line, because of the Jim Acosta ban and other similar dramas where any reporter or organization not showing overt deference lost their access, today that reporter from The Hill just put it out there, in essence saying, “Fuck it, take my press pass, this is the reality.”
I was truly glad to see it. When a reporter for a national outlet like The Hill decides that the truth is more important than White House access, it’s a serious problem for the White House.
The dam is breaking all over. But it’s an incredibly dangerous time, and they can still wreak massive havoc on their way down and out in a Leviathan’s tail scenario, no matter how inevitable that exit may seem or how much copium I’m toking on any given day, lol.
EDITED to self-correct: Sean Spicer had already resigned by the time Jim Acosta got his White House ban
I’m finally finding people who are seeing what’s really happening, and are seeing some potential light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a long ways to get there, but I can at least see a potential path out of this, without a devastating Civil War.
It’s going to take having an election in November. He’s going to try and stop it, but elections are a state-managed process, so what if Blue states decide to have their elections, and send new reps to DC to be sworn in by Johnson? What if there are so many that it flips the House? What if the MAGA government decides to honor Trump’s demands over a legal election?
Constitutional Crisis, anyone?
I just got into that with someone here the other day, lol. Not my clearest writing, but dude was just delusional, IMO.
While your reasoning is sound, I don’t share your sang-froid. We should not assume that there will be elections, unless we are organized, with a plan to make them happen. Trump and MAGA have largely gotten what they want because they’re exploiting a power vacuum. The only times they’ve backed down are when they’ve actually faced opposition. Their disorganization and collective psychopathy make them weak. They overcome that weakness by using momentum, by flooding the zone with shit, and by exploiting the spinelessness of the opposition. We have to deny them that momentum, stop the endless flood of propaganda, and most importantly, organize.
Nobody knows what’s going to happen, everything is speculation, but one thing we can count on - MAGA is capable of ANYTHING, no matter how heinous and unspeakable.
The fascist reality tv show host with dementia needs to be gelded.
needs to be gelded
At his age and state of health, that wouldn’t make any difference, assuming you could even find those atrophied parts under the dangling pannus.
